Hitler’s Children

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Screened at —

JIFF 2012

What is it like growing up with an appellation that immediately raises images of murder and genocide? How do you cope with being the children or descendants of the world’s most notorious war criminals?

Hitler’s Children speaks to those who’ve inherited the names of the most powerful figures in the Nazi regime – Himmler, Frank, Goering, Goeth, von Ribbentrop – those responsible for the deep wounds that still scar the German soul two generations later.

Without fancy camerawork, editing trickery or the pushing of emotional buttons with musical flourishes, filmmaker Chanoch Ze’evi captures their rapprochement almost 70 years later, as they conclude the time has come to finally move on. In the process, he discovers fascinating similarities between the emotions of the relatives of Holocaust perpetrators and those of survivors, some of whom meet the children of their tormentors in this film.